Obama shuns limelight, builds record
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Printable FormatST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
By Deirdre Shesgreen
On Thursday, as his colleagues scrambled to wrap up legislative loose ends, Sen. Barack Obama met behind closed doors with Sen. Tom Coburn, an archconservative Republican from Oklahoma.
The pair scolded the government's top emergency management official over ongoing problems responding to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
On Friday morning, Obama, D-Ill., was standing beside his home-state colleague, liberal Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, urging officials to spend the $12 million the two had snagged to bolster protection of federal judges after a Chicago judge's husband and mother were fatally shot earlier this year.
The twin events - one with national implications and the other with local import - capture how carefully and slowly Obama has chosen to spend his considerable political capital after arriving in Washington with near rock-star status in January.
Tagged as a rising Democratic star and touted as presidential material before he had even cast his first vote, Obama's biggest challenge was managing expectations - expectations that flowered after his dazzling prime-time speech to the Democratic National Convention in August 2004 and when Newsweek magazine put him on the cover before he was even sworn in.
From the outset, Obama and his advisers have viewed the political hoopla and media frenzy with as much worry as glee, fearing it could quickly turn sour if the ambitious new lawmaker stumbled or seemed overly eager to be in the spotlight.
"There are unique pressures associated with (all the attention), and we were mindful of that," said David Axelrod, a political consultant for Obama. "Barack's greatest concern was being a good colleague, doing the work and not being viewed as a kind of pin-up."
So Obama has devoted his first year to tamping down expectations, quieting the buzz, avoiding the Sunday talk shows. That strategy itself is not without risk, because he has seemed at times overly cautious and reluctant to step out.
He has checked his star power on the national stage by delving into a few carefully hand-picked issues - most with bipartisan overtones and centrist rhetoric such as the federal government's response to Katrina.
On the ground in Illinois, he has been just as meticulous, tending to bread-and-butter home-state issues almost as if he's up for re-election next year instead of in five years. It was, his advisers say, a necessary and methodical decision, because Obama feared Illinois voters - just like his Senate colleagues - might be suspicious of his ambitions.
"He was very careful to keep an eye on the state," said Chris Mooney, a political scientist at the University of Illinois at Springfield. Obama has done a lot of "down-home stuff, and it plays well. He carries it off pretty genuinely."
In separate interviews, his aides and the senator himself all made sure a reporter knew how many "town hall" meetings he had conducted this year (39) and touted the local issues he had worked on. Among them: fair pay for Illinois veterans, government subsidies for ethanol and a controversial $2.5 billion locks project for the Mississippi and Illinois rivers.
Banking on Obama
But Obama hasn't shied away from the national stage completely.
For starters, he has served as a money magnet for his party and for himself, easily raising loads of campaign cash for Senate Democrats, filling the coffers of his own political action committee and parlaying his new celebrity into a $1.9 million book contract.
"With the possible exception of Hillary Clinton in years gone by, I don't think there's another member of the caucus as sought after" for campaigning and fundraising trips, said Durbin.
"I have a lot of fundraising capital," Obama acknowledged.
He headlined an Arizona Democratic Party event that raked in $1 million. He wrote an e-mail that helped raise more than $800,000 for Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va. And he set up a special leadership PAC - called Hopefund Inc. - so he could raise even more money, collecting more than $850,000 so far this year.
All this, Obama says, has been done with little effort on his part; he estimated he has spent about two hours a week on fundraising, a fraction of the hours other lawmakers put in working the phones.
"One of the lucky prerogatives of my name recognition, it does make it easier in terms of fundraising," he said. "Most Democratic donors know me."
As far as shaping the debate on national policy, Obama said he wanted to do so without "chasing cameras and commenting on every issue."
Moderate approach
He chose a half-dozen or so mostly noncontroversial topics on which to carve a niche. And on those issues - which range from the government's preparedness for avian flu to destroying weapons stockpiles in the former Soviet Union - he has mostly crafted a moderate stance, often working closely with a Republican colleague.
He went to Russia and the Ukraine with Sen. Richard Lugar, R- Ind., to inspect weapons storage sites. He teamed up with Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., to offer a "sensible center" proposal on the divisive issue of immigration reform.
And he joined Sen. Coburn on Katrina, where he generated considerable attention by visiting New Orleans and wading into the debate over whether the slow response was driven by racism. (That accusation, he said at the time, was "too simplistic," although he took the Bush administration to task more broadly for its policies toward the poor.)
Since then, Obama has focused his follow-up efforts on being a government watchdog as the Federal Emergency Management Agency doles out billions of dollars in reconstruction money.
He and Coburn called for a chief financial officer to oversee all the spending. Their proposal has stalled, but the two senators have continued to pound on FEMA in public and private on the issue.
Obama said his interests converged with those of Coburn, the conservative Republican. "Tom and I may not agree how money should always be spent, but we can agree that money should not be wasted," he said. "When you're allocating huge sums of money that's vanishing in no-bid contracts, that's hurting poor people as well as the taxpayers."
Obama's approach has mostly earned him rave reviews - from Republicans and Democrats alike - who say he is an open-minded, deliberative lawmaker.
Coburn called him a "phenomenal young man who will go to great heights," while Martinez said he hasn't seemed "dogmatic" or "ideologically driven" on any issue.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. and a frequent maverick within the GOP, said: "He's very impressive, he's thoughtful, he's centrist."
Cautious on Iraq
Obama's voting record shows fewer signs of independence. He supported a GOP-backed bill to impose new limits on class-action lawsuits and also said yes to Condoleezza Rice's confirmation for secretary of state, even as some of his Democratic colleagues used that vote to object to the Bush administration's Iraq war policy. But he has otherwise mostly voted with his fellow Democrats.
Obama also has taken a cautious tack on Iraq. He campaigned strongly against the war last year, and many expected him to be a forceful voice on the subject.
But Obama waded into the fray over Iraq after there was already a deafening drumbeat of criticism from both Democrats and Republicans of the administration's conduct of the war. And his speech offered little new; his call for a phased draw-down of troops, for example, had already been bandied about by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and others.
"The war has been a big challenge" for him, said Ronald Walters, a political science professor at the University of Maryland. "Because he comes from a community that is opposed to the war, and from a caucus that has mixed views . . . he has to be careful." His stance is "symptomatic of his moderation," said Walters.
Walters sees such positions as politically smart, and he sees Obama as part of a "new generation" of African-American leaders who are "less strident, less demanding, less militant."
Obama said his view on the war has been consistent. He thought it was wrong to get in but that now the United States has a responsibility to see the conflict through, which is why he doesn't support a quick withdrawal. Obama said he doesn't think he's being too cautious - on Iraq or anything else.
His allies and several outside observers agree. Mooney, the University of Illinois professor, said it would be more out of character for Obama to strike a hard line than to craft moderate policies as he's doing.
"I don't see him doing anything different than he did in the state house," Mooney said. "He's not a knee-jerk ideologue."
And there will be plenty of time for Obama to step out more forcefully. Next month, he plans on visiting Iraq and Israel, and in the summer, he will probably visit Africa, including a stop in his father's native Kenya.
Said Durbin: "He understands this political life is a marathon and not a sprint. He's been careful to pace himself, from a personal and political point of view."